At a cost of £155 per square meter per year (if outwith the World Heritage Site, more if within), hospitality businesses that sell food and drink can apply to the Edinburgh City Council to use outdoor furniture on the pavement outside their premises between 9am and 9pm. Businesses have to adhere to strict guidelines outlining what area of the pavement we take up, and ensure proper wind management is set up.

This is all well and good, and ensures safety standards are maintained. What we, and many other hospitality businesses, take issues with is that we are only allowed to take tables out after 9am. Coffee shops and bakeries rely greatly on early morning trade before 9am. In our own case, pre-9am trade makes up roughly 20% of our daily revenue, and roughly 2/5 of that includes customers using our outdoor seating, the rest being takeaway. This might not seem like a huge amount, but when one considers the extremely tight profit margins food and drink vendors have to deal with, every penny counts in ensuring hospitality businesses like us can survive. Some of us are also unlucky enough to be subject to the council’s extortionate business rates. Since we’ve raised this issue with our community on our social media platforms, we’ve heard how the council has single handedly crippled other small businesses by continuously raising the business rates they’ve had to pay. We’ve heard of other horror stories our customers have had to endure under the council. Most importantly, we’ve received tremendous support from various members of the community and other businesses across Edinburgh.

The council gives the following reason for not allowing outdoor furniture before 9am: “The restriction of furniture placed on the pavement before 0900hrs is a time set and agreed with our Waste service colleagues across the City to allow as much opportunity as possible for that service to cleanse the pavements with limited obstructions.”(1) This is all well and good, if street cleaning vehicles actually operated before 9am. Approximately 80% of the time they have cleaned our streets after 9am, usually at 11am or 12pm. They’ve only kept to their pre-9am rule perhaps 10% of the time. The other 10%, they have not shown up at all. The council themselves admit that their “colleagues” in the waste sector cannot guarantee complete cleaning of the streets before 9am: “it is recognised that Waste may not always have the opportunity to cleanse all pavements before (…) they also recognise that after 0900hrs there will be limited access.”(1) The council fails to explain how they arrived at 9am as the allowed starting time for us to use the pavement in front of our businesses. They also fail to realise that these cleaning vehicles actually do not make much of a difference to the pavement’s cleanliness.

The council also states that another “point in setting a restriction of 0900hrs and 2100hrs/ 2200hrs is to reduce any potential nuisance that may be experienced by any neighbouring residents.”(1) How the council can apply the same standards of nuisance to coffee shops or bakeries in the morning as to venues selling alcohol in the evening is beyond reason. Our customers at 8am are usually parents to newborns who haven’t slept all night, or runners finishing their morning jog, not drunk and possibly disorderly patrons.

Does the council not consider, in the case of Leith Walk at least, the trams dinging their bells at 5:30am a nuisance? Have they conveniently forgotten the nuisance the comedically dangerously designed bike lanes cause? Or the rusty planters the council installed on the Walk (the same ones the council have finally admitted were a mistake and are in the process of removing)? The council has wasted enough of the tax payer’s money, businesses’ rates and permit payments on horribly conceived plans that were supposed to be for the betterment of the city.

Venues operating in the evening can apply to the council to extend their outdoor seating to 10pm. Why is this not allowed in the reverse case for the multitude of coffee shops/cafes operating in the early hours? Why cannot those who would greatly benefit from an earlier permit apply for an extension from 8am?

There is a larger, more important argument to be made here. Allowing hospitality businesses to use their own furniture an hour earlier will also contribute greatly to strengthening Edinburgh’s economic development. No one can deny the fact that hospitality businesses are a huge employer in the city. But also, famously, we are an industry with a high rate of closures. I’m sure the council does not want to see more morning eateries close down, and are (at least on the face of it) in favour of positive economic development? The council’s website claims they are “Putting our customers first and looking after Edinburgh.”(4) Considering how they have treated most businesses in Edinburgh - who pay the council tremendous amounts of pounds in permit fees and rates - this is an absolute joke. The council’s official economic strategy “aims to ensure that the city’s economic priorities continue to meet the needs of citizens and businesses and drive a strong and fair recovery from the economic effects of the Covid 19 pandemic”.(2) Most businesses who have managed to survive Covid are still struggling to recover. The council has done absolutely nothing to help us. They give the impression that they are actively trying to, at best, make our lives unnecessarily difficult, or at the very worst close down businesses and push forward the city’s economic downturn. We appreciate that the council has limited funds to work with, but we are not asking for any changes that would increase the city’s costs. We are simply asking for the council to stop being lazy in thought, and to care more for the city they claim to be working for.

Lastly, we would also like to make the public aware of how we have been treated by the council’s street enforcement officers. At the slightest challenge to their supposed authority, they have implied that our outdoor furniture license will not be renewed because we do not simply accept their baseless rules as valid. They have implicitly threatened to blacklist us if we keep on questioning their power. This is, of course, incredibly unethical and a further stain to the council’s reputation.

We would also like to make the council aware that we, and I’m sure many other businesses, are more than happy to accept terms that ensure we adhere to stricter cleaning procedures within our area of outdoor occupation if the rules are reformed and more aligned with common sense.

In conclusion, we, and many other businesses, hold that 9am cannot in any way be justified by the council as the earliest that hospitality businesses can be allowed to put their chairs and tables on the pavement. Many of us miss out on a significant amount of trade in the morning because of this seemingly arbitrary, baseless and totally unfair rule. If rules don’t make sense and contribute to further economic decline, the Council has a duty to change them. The Council is too comfortable maintaining the status quo. We demand a total change of the Council’s Outdoor Tables and Chairs Permit Licensing rules, and more broadly a total reform of their Business Policies. Should the council ignore this call, we have no choice but to accept that the City of Edinburgh Council is actively trying to suppress the capital’s economic development and kill off its community of small, independent businesses.

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1: Email from the Street Enforcement Service | West Team

2: https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/economicstrategy

4: Edinburgh Council Website